Urgent help needed alleviate ambulance and hospital emergencies

Exmouth Community Food Larder manager Anthony Bernard. (Image: Archant)

Every beaver knows that a blockage in a river needs to be cleared from the initial obstruction.

Worrying about backed up stagnant pools doesn't sort the problem; the channel needs to be cleared upstream.

Children also learn this when constructing water channels and pools on the beach.

Care in the community and care homes are not able to take people when they should be discharged from hospitals; that is the fundamental cause of backed up ambulances and emergency departments.

Reporters talk about deaths caused by these delays, as well as people remaining in hospital and catching diseases there. Are there more deaths from these causes than from the great disasters at Grenfell Tower or the Manchester bombings?

People's lives matter; any preventable death is one too many, whether at a big public event or in the quiet. How many ambulances need to be backed up with people hurting to qualify as a disaster, or does it need actual deaths?

Funding and recruitment into Social Services and the Care Sector is at least as important as any other health and safety issue; lives may depend on it, including yours and mine!! These activities only come into focus when they are desperately needed.

Harrowing stories of delays getting attention to people in urgent need make compulsive viewing; interviews with patients in hospital, fully recovered but impatient to get home with support services, could be boring! Interviews with busy staff, overloaded, underpaid and hurt by the cost of living crisis, is repetitive - but those are the real issues the media and politicians should focus on.

25 years ago my mother was rushed into hospital with heart failure; expert attention got her well quite soon. Her next challenge was to get home, but the system would not allow her to go home without a support structure!! We found her a place in a care home.

To escape the care home she had to agree to a daily home carer; it only took a week with mother before the carer threw her hands in the air and walked out.

My mother was then back where she wanted, on her own, with a daughter-in-law coming in most days!! Home help and places in Care Homes were easily available 25 years ago - that is what is missing today.

An idea of easing the situation with "convalescent homes" will not work; if there were staff available, existing homes and social care would be properly staffed!! Recruitment needs better wages; better hours are not an option in the care sector.

Every beaver knows how necessary it is to find the blockage, clear that and then build a dam to create a good clear wildlife friendly pond where you want it.

Clever people should be able adapt the beaver's logic to understand that caring for the Carers is the key to people flowing into and out of our otherwise excellent hospitals.

The majority of us do not need "care" right now. But most of us will surely need care one day, and are hoping it will be there when we do. Similarly, we hope not to be in an accident needing an emergency ambulance, but stuff happens.

There are more accidents in the home than on the roads, so there is no basis for feeling "safe".

The 'care sector' affects most of us at some time; we need to be sure it is there. Airports have baggage handlers ready for travellers.